Roman Numerals and Duct Tape

At first I thought, there is no way I'm going to dress up like that and walk down the street for everyone to see.

Then I thought, there is no way I'm going to greet the babysitter dressed up liked that.

But when Nat said, You look like a really good Roman numeral!, I suddenly felt like it was okay to walk down the street wrapped up in a bed sheet to go to a Toga party. Because I am pretty hard to embarrass.

Like, being the driver of a vehicle held together by tape does not phase me in the least.

For the better part of a year, the only way I could pick my van out of a crowded parking lot was to look for the one that had no magnets, bumper stickers, or window clings on the back. No 26.2 (I'm more of a 2.4 kind of girl, and that's if we're power walking). No OBX (the Outer Banks are nice, but not nearly enough t-shirt shops to quench my "It's not a beer belly, it's a fuel tank for the love machine" fix). No CGL (just so I don't confuse people and make them think my monogrammed van was a present from Things Remembered).

What I did have was duct tape holding my tail light on.

I'm not sure how it fell off- I promise, I did not bump into anything. I was in the mountains and when I went back to the parking space, it was just laying there on the ground. I like to think maybe a dimwitted bear was playing chicken with the van after he got done crushing aluminum cans on his forehead.

Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the duct tape. It made it really easy to spot my vehicle when I forgot where I parked. Sure, the fix was only $29 and two minutes of Matt's time, but why the rush?

I'm probably not nearly embarrassable enough for my age.

(That's definitely a real word.)

The duct tape has been gone for quite a while, and I have spent considerably longer amounts of time searching for my van in the sea of anonymous booster seat-filled minivans in the Super Wal-Mart parking lot. Well, it was time to do something about that.

As I got the kids in the van after Daniel's Safety Town graduation, I watched in my rear-view window as a steady stream of children walked through the parking deck, singing songs about traffic lights to their parents. I must have been there, just waiting for this parade to end, for at least ten minutes. Which was probably only two minutes in real life. But if definitely felt like ten.

So when the children all disappeared into their cars and I had an opportunity to back up without running over a Safety Town graduate, I proceeded to do so. And apparently had forgotten that I parked next to a cement pillar.

Oops. Cut it a little too close there. Knocked off my side-view mirror and put a pretty large dent in the passenger's side door. ON THE WAY OUT OF SAFETY TOWN.

But the good news was that I still had leftover duct tape in my console.

(Hey, it's not cancer.)